Today I added some shadows and reflections to page 45. When I looked closely at the line work, I found many small errors, including some hooks at the end of the line, tangents, intersections, and crazy bad circles. Fortunately Clip Studio Paint has many time-saving features to correct all of the problems except my bad drawing. It’s no accident that professional comic artists use CSP for inking and coloring.
Page 32 is a complicated page with a detailed background. To rein myself in and force myself to use a proven method that will keep from getting confused. I’ll ink the page, then block in the colors, then add the shading.
I used the Clip Studio straight line tool to create the bookcase because my straight lines are took shaky for comfort. I’ll work on those lines to rough them up so they don’t look out of place.
It may seem odd that a 400-year old Moai kid has a computer on his desk, but that’s just the way my world works.
Today I revised the jaguar hiding behind the tree and gave him a more active pose. I took a picture of myself spying on my sofa and used it as a reference.
I’m having trouble with Jimmy Jay’s arms — they’re all twisted and painful to look at — I’ll have to work on them. I’ve add some fellow travelers on the road: a large snail, two friendly mice (they may be rats), and a tortoise. In the background a large python is thinking of what he’ll have for lunch.
Tomorrow I’m going to work on the background foliage. I’ll also add a monkey hanging from a vine, a road sign, and some small wings for Buddy Butterfly. I change the size of Buddy’s wings to suit each picture’s composition. Creative license is handy when you’ve painted yourself into a corner.
Today I started inking the Aztec Jaguar Cafe picture. This drawing shows the kids enjoying a well-deserved snack after the exhausting hassle of getting past the border wall. They found this cafe that serves the right kind of food and they’re about to dive into a gigantic vegan burrito. Behind them the owner of the restaurant is keeping an eye on them. He looks cranky and disapproving. What’s that about?
Gotta work on that bouquet of flowers!
I experimented today with Clip Studio Paint’s reference layers. Reference layers are useful for flatting images. For one thing, color can be applied to a layer beneath a reference layer using a bucket tool and the paint will conform to the line boundaries of the reference layer.
I also continued my search of a simple mono-width digital brush similar to a Rapidograph technical pen. Such a pen brush would have absolutely no features, with no dynamic pressure opacity or flow variables. I haven’t found such a unicorn brush yet — it seems that everyone wants to design fancy brushes, not simple brushes. I’ve checked the Clip Studio Assets site, which has many thousands of brushes, but haven’t found what I want. Perhaps if I could enter the term “mono-width pen” in Japanese I might find something. I’d better start learning some Kanji!
Today’s art club challenge was to sketch and ink. I decided to copy a page from Moebius’ The World of Edena. I’m a super fan of his clean line style, with no shading, minimal hatching, and flat colors. Since I’m learning to draw landscapes, I copied page 167, which shows an aerial view of a meadow in the midst of a forest stretching to the horizon. I added my three characters at the bottom left as they hustle across the open grass.
